Opinion in brief: KGB redux

Friday, November 23, 2012

The organization in which Vladimir Putin spent much of his adult life — the Soviet KGB or Committee on State Security — specialized in making life miserable for Jews. Putin’s old outfit picked up where the Czarist pograms left off, smoothing the rough edges a little.

Now here is Putin lecturing Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel on the need to be sensitive not to encourage anti-Semitism. Merkel had chastised the Kremlin for imprisoning the protest rock group “Pussy Riot” after it staged an anti-Putin demonstration in a Moscow cathedral. Putin had first objected that the demonstration was sacrilegious, as if he hails from a background solicitous of the church. With Merkel he came up with a new line: that the protest group had once urged that Moscow be “cleansed” of Jews. Oozing sanctimony, Putin sniffed: “We cannot support, with you, people who hold anti-Semitic positions.”

His assertion was baseless but right out of the KGB manual on disinformation. Be bold and self-righteous in asserting falsehoods. — The Trentonian